What is VOR (VORP) in Fantasy Football?
Two players go in the same round of your draft. One finishes as a league-winner. The other is barely better than what’s sitting on the waiver wire. ADP didn’t tell you that would happen. VOR would have.
Value Over Replacement, or VOR (sometimes called VORP, Value Over Replacement Player), is the most useful draft metric most fantasy players never look at. It answers a simple question: how much better is this player than the last guy you’d start at their position?
The Formula
VOR = Player’s Projected Points − Replacement-Level Points at Their PositionThat’s it. “Replacement level” means the worst starter in your league at that position. In a 12-team PPR league where you start 1 QB, 3 RBs, 4 WRs, and 1 TE, there are 12 starting QBs, 36 starting RBs, 48 starting WRs, and 12 starting TEs across the league. The last one in each group is the replacement-level player.
The VOR rankings on this site are calculated from player projections sourced from Sleeper, the fantasy platform. Here are the current replacement-level players based on those projections:
- QB12: Bo Nix (DEN) at 289.7 projected PPR points
- RB36: Aaron Jones (MIN) at 132.3 projected PPR points
- WR48: Jauan Jennings (SF) at 156.7 projected PPR points
- TE12: George Kittle (SF) at 151.9 projected PPR points
Any player projected above their position’s baseline has positive VOR. The higher the VOR, the more they help your team relative to what you could find for free.
Why VOR Matters More Than Raw Points
Josh Allen is projected for 361.5 PPR points. Bijan Robinson is projected for 324.9. If you only looked at total points, you’d think Allen was the better pick.
VOR tells a different story.
Allen’s VOR is 71.8. Robinson’s is 192.6. Robinson is worth nearly three times more above replacement level than Allen, because the gap between Allen and the QB12 (Bo Nix at 289.7 points) is small. The gap between Robinson and the RB36 (Aaron Jones at 132.3 points) is enormous.
In other words: you can find a decent QB late. You cannot find a decent RB late. That’s positional scarcity, and VOR is how you measure it.
The Top 20 by VORP (12-Team PPR)
These numbers are a snapshot from early in the 2026 off-season, before free agency and the NFL Draft. Projections will shift as players change teams, rookies get drafted, and depth charts take shape. The VOR rankings tool always reflects the most current Sleeper projections, so check there for the live picture.
| Rank | Player | Pos | VOR |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bijan Robinson | RB | 192.6 |
| 2 | Jahmyr Gibbs | RB | 175.6 |
| 3 | De’Von Achane | RB | 159.1 |
| 4 | Christian McCaffrey | RB | 158.7 |
| 5 | Puka Nacua | WR | 155.8 |
| 6 | Jonathan Taylor | RB | 148.1 |
| 7 | Ja’Marr Chase | WR | 144.3 |
| 8 | James Cook | RB | 141.4 |
| 9 | Jaxon Smith-Njigba | WR | 127.9 |
| 10 | Ashton Jeanty | RB | 127.2 |
| 11 | Amon-Ra St. Brown | WR | 123.8 |
| 12 | Derrick Henry | RB | 114.5 |
| 13 | CeeDee Lamb | WR | 113.8 |
| 14 | Saquon Barkley | RB | 111.2 |
| 15 | Omarion Hampton | RB | 102.0 |
| 16 | Chase Brown | RB | 99.5 |
| 17 | Trey McBride | TE | 89.0 |
| 18 | Breece Hall | RB | 88.3 |
| 19 | Josh Jacobs | RB | 84.5 |
| 20 | Drake London | WR | 84.2 |
Ten of the top 20 are running backs. Five are wide receivers. One is a tight end. Zero are quarterbacks.
Josh Allen, the highest-scoring player in all of fantasy football, doesn’t crack this list. He ranks 30th in VOR. That’s the whole point of this metric: it strips away the noise of total points and shows you where the real positional value is.
The Position-by-Position Picture
Running backs dominate. The top 4 VOR players are all RBs, led by Bijan Robinson’s 192.6. That number means Robinson is projected to outscore the last startable RB by nearly 200 points over a full season. There is no equivalent gap at any other position.
Wide receivers are next. Puka Nacua leads at 155.8 VOR. The WR position has more startable depth (48 starters vs. 36 RBs), so even elite receivers have a slightly smaller edge over replacement.
Tight end has the steepest cliff. Trey McBride (89.0 VOR) and Brock Bowers (82.6) are both top-20 VOR players. But the TE3, Colston Loveland, is at 42.2. That 40-point drop from TE2 to TE3 is the biggest single-spot cliff in the rankings.
When you see a cliff like that in the VOR data, it’s a draft signal. If McBride or Bowers is still on the board and you’re thinking about waiting one more round, the VOR cliff says don’t. The drop from getting one of those two to getting the next guy is bigger than the gap between most first-round picks and third-round picks at other positions. A cliff in VOR means “the value is about to disappear.” Grab the player before it does, even if their ADP feels slightly early.
Quarterbacks are a late-round position in 1QB. Josh Allen’s 71.8 VOR makes him the only QB worth an early pick. After Allen, the next QB (Jalen Hurts at 27.3 VOR) is barely above the WR30 in value. The position is simply too deep to justify high draft capital in single-QB formats.
VOR Is a Living Ranking
You might have noticed George Kittle sitting at TE12, the replacement-level baseline. This is a projection snapshot from February, well before roster cuts, free agency signings, and injury news have reshaped depth charts. By August, the TE landscape could look completely different. Maybe Kittle moves up if the 49ers add weapons that open the field for him. Maybe a different tight end gets hurt and the baseline shifts entirely.
That’s the nature of VOR: it changes as projections change. A player who’s replacement-level in February could be a top-10 VOR asset by September, or the reverse. The numbers in this post illustrate the concept, but the VOR rankings tool recalculates from the latest Sleeper projections so you’re always working with the current picture.
Format Changes Everything
All of the above assumes a standard 1QB league. Switch to Superflex (2QB), and the math shifts hard.
In Superflex, the QB replacement level drops from QB12 to QB24 (231.5 projected points instead of 289.7). That lower baseline means elite QBs suddenly have massive VOR. Josh Allen jumps from rank 30 in 1QB formats to rank 5 in Superflex, with a VOR of 130.0. Jalen Hurts goes from rank 58 to rank 15.
The VOR tool lets you toggle between 1QB and Superflex to see exactly how your format changes positional value. If you play Superflex and you’re drafting QBs like it’s a 1QB league, VOR will show you the mistake.
How to Use VOR in Your Draft
VOR isn’t a draft order. It’s a lens.
Use it alongside ADP to find value: when a player’s ADP is later than their VOR ranking, you’re getting more positional value than the draft market is pricing in. When ADP is earlier than VOR, you’re overpaying relative to what you could get by waiting.
All projections in this post and in the VOR tool come from Sleeper, based on data for 2,865 skill-position players. Projections will shift as free agency, the NFL Draft, and training camp shake out. The tool updates as they do.
Go see where your targets rank: VOR Rankings